Memory – A Lavi/Cho One-Shot
A perfect memory was both a curse and a blessing. The good memories never faded, like bright pictures in his mind, but neither did the bad. But there was an advantage. When he lay awake at night, unable to degrade the memories he is forced to analyse them as if scratching at them like this will eventually kill them. Each quiet moment leads to a contemplation, a consideration of the chosen memory and it is through this he has discovered that no memory is black and white. There may be an overwhelming emotion, but there are always undertones of another. Everything is bittersweet, sweetbitter.
He discovered this when thinking about Chomesuke.
There are two moments in his mind that define the short time she was with them.
~ She shivers behind the flags, trying desperately not to breathe, to quell the tears that drip down her face and catch in the moonlight, betraying her emotions to him. She cannot help it, her face seems made to constantly show off her emotions, from her wide and infectious grins to her increasing fear and sadness. Her thin human disguise shakes under his hand with fear and with upset. She is warm and it is hard to remember that she is an Akuma. Even later upon viewing the body of her friend she tries to hide her emotions, turning her back to her unlikely companions when she cannot control the rictus of fear that stills her face. Lavi thinks that perhaps he is the only one who hears her detached murmur and understands her fear. A moment later the thought is forced from his mind as the Level Three snatches her from in front of him and he slips into battle mode.
~ The other is the striking image of her face, twisting and contorting, marked by it's black star as she tells him that she is going to die. Through no fault of hers. Angry worms twist in his gut at the thought that she was created to be this fragile, born to die. Her tiny butterfly existence is nothing compared to his. Minutes later he stares back, unable to take his eyes off her as she falls. At that moment she's not even human, but he always remembers her as such, her big brown eyes soft, and a warm farewell smile imposed over the grotesque yellow casing of her forced machinery. He refuses to think of her as a machine, even now. Gramps tells him the Bookman way, "Don't get lost in the moment, don't cry, there isn't the time." There wasn't then, but there always is time later, and this memory, this always drags water from his eyes in the dark.
He knows it is not Bookman Junior who records these memories, it is Lavi. Lavi would not abandon Cho to a cannibal demon and Lavi cannot let her pretty, annoyed smile go. For a while he wondered what this meant, assuming it was just his natural and uncontrollable attraction to pretty faces. But he has to try and apply the Bookman logic as Gramps would say. Look at the moments, look at the movements and finally understand that, no matter how brief their meeting, no matter how few memories he does have of her, they all bring the same warming sensation of underlying affection. Perhaps only Gramps and he know how the little moments, the little pictures and choices change the courses of generations, of lives, and Cho was a change to him, a little change in the gathering moment of the fact that he cannot combine his two selves, but neither can they be wholly separate. It hurts, it always hurts, but if the alternative was to never have known Cho, he would never go back.
